The Fugitive

If I'm flipping channels, and I find The Fugitive with Harrison Ford playing, regardless of the point in the story, I can't change the channel until the film is over.

I probably have seen this film two dozen times over the years — mostly on television, replete with commercial interruptions that I dutifully sit through so I can watch the rest of the movie. Again.

There are a few other films like that. Die Hard and The Silence of the Lambs come to mind, among others, but not one of them works like The Fugitive.

As a still-aspiring screenwriter, I've read a lot about Jeb Stuart and David Twohy's script, which has one of the best stories of any action/suspense pictures in the last 30 years. The Fugitive is easily the best work of either Stuart or Twohy's career.

The film isn't perfect, but The Fugitive is great entertainment. Sure, there are a couple of plot holes and implausible sequences. (The dam jump, anyone?) But that stuff is easy to pass off as one-in-a-million chances that work out for Kimble.

Maybe the most frustrating aspect of the film is the opening credits, which run off and on for the first 15 minutes of the movie. They seem endless. A film this suspenseful loses impact if you distract viewers with opening credits that drag so long into Act One. Mercifully, the credits end at 14:49, just before the iconic bus/train sequence.

The film doesn't have another sequence quite like the train accident. The rooftop chase is fine, but nothing like the rooftop sequence in, say, Die Hard. The climactic chase through the laundry is weakly symbolic (Kimble delving into someone else's dirty laundry to exonerate himself). But...I don't care.

In a way, re-watching The Fugitive is like doing a job I really love. I get to do this fun and exciting thing and get the same or similar result every time. I get to think about the time I spent in Chicago, the memories of which are bittersweet at best.

Much of this film is shot within the Chicago city limits, with easily recognizable locations — especially along Randolph St., near the Thompson Center. When I lived in Chicago, I worked about two blocks from there. When Chicago weather allowed, I used to walk to the Thompson Center to eat lunch and get my hair cut (on good days, I could afford both).

Chicago was a rough period for me, which I've mentioned here before and don't want to belabor. I had ambitions of doing improv and finding work as an advertising copywriter. I did the improv, but most of the ad agencies I contacted responded with indifference. Of course they did — I had no experience, and the economy tanked right around November 2000, when I moved to town. One creative director seemed interested, but she had no job openings. She said, "You never know, though — things change."

Not much changed except the weather. Eventually, I realized I could neither eat nor pay my bills regardless of whether I kept my job. So I quit. A few weeks later, I left town and went back to grad school.

I've done improv only a handful of times in the 10 years since. Imagine my surprise when I learned that much of the dialogue in The Fugitive was improvised or otherwise invented by the actors, including Tommy Lee Jones' famous "I don't care."

I learned at The Second City that most of the sketch revues are written through improvisation and refinement rather than clacking away at a keyboard. Improv is just another form of writing. That said, an ordinary script can become extraordinary in the hands of the right actors. That's exactly what happened to The Fugitive.

Neither Jeb Stuart nor David Twohy ever have written what you'd call critically bulletproof material, but put the writing in front of Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, give them some freedom, and see what happens.

That's more than enough to keep me watching. Again.